Last week, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced its plans to award money to people who can transform their common household items—electronics, chemicals, 3D-printed parts, etc.—into improvised weapons.

The agency is attempting to adopt the typical “inventor’s eye” (albeit, also a terrorist’s one) to assess how seemingly harmless technologies can be converted into serious national security threats—and, more importantly, to defend against them.

“For decades, U.S. national security was ensured in large part by a simple advantage: a near-monopoly on access to the most advanced technologies,” DARPA stated in its press release. “Increasingly, however, off-the-shelf equipment…features highly sophisticated components, which resourceful adversaries can modify or combine to create novel and unanticipated security threats.”

DARPA’s program, dubbed Improv, invites engineers, biologists, information technologists, and skilled hobbyists to present their “good” bad ideas, which DARPA will assess and (if selected) develop from concept to working prototype within about 90 days.

If there is actually a quadruple, a quintuple, or even a sextuple FACEPALM this would warrant it.

This seems more like a plan to get a list of people who know how to build ummm...things that make loud noises.

My thought was to create a data base of common items that could be used in such a way, and then make a program that would alert the FBI if anyone buys a combination of those items. The FBI would then visit your house to see if your building a bomb....

But, a data base of people who built the bomb and then turned it in for the reward money makes sense, too.